Karen

EDITOR’S PICKS:

Holi is the Hindu festival of colors. It celebrates the coming of spring, fruitful harvests, unity, joy, and a tale from the Bhagavad Gita. In addition to the throwing of colored powder (Holi Gulal) it is traditional to light bonfires in celebration of the miraculous escape that young devotee of the god Vishnu. A demon tried to throw him into a fire, but he escaped without any injuries due to his unshakable devotion. In most areas, Holi lasts about two days. One of Holi’s biggest customs is the loosening strictness of social structures, which normally include age, sex, status, and caste. Holi closes the wide gaps between social classes and brings Hindus together. Together, the rich and poor, women and men, enjoy each other’s presence on this joyous day. Additionally, Holi lowers the strictness of social norms. No one expects the decorum of normal life; as a result, the atmosphere is filled with excitement and joy.

HAZMAT MODINE draws from the rich soil of American music of the 20’s and 30’s through to the 50’s and early 60’s, blending elements of early Blues, Hokum Jugband, Swing, Klezmer, New Orleans R & B, and Jamaican Rocksteady. The band is fronted by two harmonicas which use call and response, harmony, melody, and syncopated interweaving rhythms. The band includes tuba, guitar, and percussion, claviola and Hawaiian steel guitar. The band’s sound reflects musical influences ranging from Avant-garde Jazz to Rockabilly and Western Swing to Middle-Eastern, African, and Hawaiian musical styles.

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Ryan Feeney’s ‘Obscene Sunsets’ series of photographs explore the power and authority that image cultures have over our sense of reality while Ryan Macdonald’s ‘Pale in Compairison’ body of work explores how the phenomenology of nostalgia and narrative can disrupt our sense of stability in a normal world.

Opening Reception 6-9PM Friday June 3 Featuring demonstrations and a live performance by exhibiting artists.

Why does a minor chord sound sad? Is there a formula for the perfect hit? Whistling, dancing, finger-snapping, and toe-tapping—what makes us do it? Find out when music and science join forces in an interactive bazaar of beats, sounds, and rhythm in the exhibition BIORHYTHM, created by the Science Gallery and presented at Eyebeam as part of the World Science Festival. Learn what drives sound manipulation and discover how different types of music evoke different emotions. Trace the power of an impactful pop hook in a song, measuring the way our brains and bodies react, down to the responses in our fingertips.

June 4 – August 5th, 2011
Clifton Benevento is proud to present the New York solo debut of Los Angeles based visual and performance artist Wu Tsang, featuring video, collage and site-specific installation.
Central to the exhibition is DAMELO TODO (Give Me Everything), 2010, a hybrid narrative-documentary installation incorporating elements of Tsang’s lived experience organizing WILDNESS, a party/performance night for two years at the Los Angeles bar Silver Platter. The film depicts a fictional protagonist, Teódulo Mejía, a 15 year-old Salvadorian civil war refugee arriving to Los Angeles in 1985, who discovers community support among trans women at the bar. Based on a short story written by Raquel Gutierrez, and adapted to screen by Tsang, DAMELO TODO fictionalizes a larger narrative about the collaboration and tenuous coalition between the Silver Platter and the young artists of WILDNESS. (READ MORE.)

Blood, Sweat, and Tears: the Work of Art and Tragedy endeavors to examine 21st century tragedy, disaster and renewal. The exhibition is an attempt to connect with contemporary artists who are also passionate about this theme. Nine artists were selected whose work explores a particular contemporary disaster, personal tragedy, or the rigor of cultivating new beginnings. As young adults who have come of age in the burgeoning 21st century, the curators of this exhibition are themselves well-versed in tragedy, disaster and renewal firsthand (as New York City dwellers) and from a distance. (READ MORE.)

The art world experienced a caesura in the 1960s when the paradigm of the artist, working in solitary fashion, was taken apart by the advent of collaborative art. Through collaboration, the definition of what art was, and how it could be produced, shifted. No longer was the cult of the artist, producing a singular vision understood to be the only viable artistic model. Instead, this now re-evaluated model began to generate questions about authenticity, authorship,audience and methodology. Such collaborative projects as those executed by Gilbert and George, Martin Kippenberger and Albert Oehlen, Jeanne Claude and Christo, and Marina Abramovic and Ulay were instrumental in the development of such major evolutions in conceptual art as Body Art, Systems Art, Earth Art, and Performance Art.

The artists in Temporary Antumbra Zone have come together, collaborating through the lenses of painting, photography, video, and mixed media sculpture to promote collaboration as an invaluable mode of artistic production.

The Booklyn Art Gallery is pleased to present MASTER OF REALITY, a group exhibition featuring works by Milano Chow, Cynthia Daignault, Gary Kachadourian, and STO.

MASTER OF REALITY includes drawings, paintings, sculpture and prints that alter our perceptions of commonplace scenery, find fodder in the mundane, and draw our attention to the handling rather than the objects themselves. The featured artists create an alternate dimension of familiar objects, carefully mimicking reality so that it is recognizable, yet altering it enough to uniquely capture their own way of seeing. (READ MORE.)

Happy BOS ’11: June 3-5, 2011 — it’s our 5th birthday!

We’re creating an open and inclusive event that benefits the neighborhood by sharing artistic projects and encouraging community interaction and dialogue. BOS brings the neighborhood’s thousands of artists and performers out into the streets and in view of each other, other community residents, and the general public. (READ MORE AND SEE FULL SCHEDULE.)

June 2 – July 1, 2011

The influence of comics on our culture continues to grow. From the pop fantasias of Hollywood blockbusters to the rawness and refinement of intimate memoirs—and everything in between—it’s impossible to deny the wide appeal of comics’ words and images. The theater, of course, is no less immune to its spell. This summer, The Brick will invite one of history’s newest art forms to meet one of its oldest—and, through collaborations between visual and dramatic artists, the form and content of comics will collide with the content and form of theater to create strange new hybrids across both media. (READ MORE.)

Although not officially open until Fall 2011, ROULETTE BROOKLYN will open its doors this June for a two day John Cage MUSICIRCUS as part of the Atlantic Avenue Art Walk!

A carnival of all things experimental, the Roulette Brooklyn MUSICIRCUS brings a cornucopia of musicians, dancers, video artists, and performance artists from all corners of New York City’s artistic community together for a celebration of chaos and and the harmonies of simultaneity. (READ MORE.)

Tony Bennett unsuspectingly coined a new term of surprising relevance when he once said he liked what Oskar Kokoschka did “along the peripheter.” Though meaning the perimeter and periphery in the painting itself, he innocently zeroed in on a murky netherworld away from the formal where success and failure, acceptance and indifference, and Tony Bennett and Oskar Kokoschka meet. Like these two disparate personalities, the artists in The Peripheterists elude the standard definition of outsiders to form a diverse and unaligned but oddly complimentary non-scene that doesn’t really register with either the hoi polloi or the intelligentsia. In many cases low-key and unsung though prodigiously gifted, all are fairly unconcerned with and unknown in that rarely satisfying milieu known as “The Art World.”

The Peripherterists examines the wide-ranging connections, affinities, and allusions amongst works that posses the popular appeal often absent at the your typical white cube. That luck, social standing, ladder climbing, and a multitude of other variables determine who gets fêted is not news by any means, but it does give rise to an urge to address that vexing situation with a gathering of mostly uncelebrated rare birds. A few encounters amongst many will have Mark Hubbard’s fantastical diagrams for actual skateparks, Gloria T. Park’s expressionist wig designs, and Jim Nieuhues’ paintings that are the basis for ski area maps consorting with Sereno Wilson’s glittery Nubian goddesses, Nicole Andrews’ paper cutouts of ennui-suffused suburbanites, and Stu Mead’s poignant, troubling, and very funny depiction of sexually active adolescents. This is not a polemic but an excursion into parallel realm of wonderful art that combines the fiercely individualistic and unorthodox with the accessible, and brings up old-fashioned but eternal questions about what art is and why people bother.

Jocko Weyland is the author of The Answer is Never – A Skateboarder’s History of the World (Grove Press, 2002) and has written for Thrasher, The New York Times, Cabinet, Apartamento and other publications, and is also the creator of Elk magazine, books and gallery.

SCHISMISM: NATURAL LAW: Lisa Karrer’s multi-media performance is inspired by the life of Charles Darwin. Karrer’s collaboration with composer and multi-instrumentalist, David Simons, features an arresting assortment of sonic and visual backdrops, including video sequences linked with original soundtracks, voice, triggered theremin, and live acoustic and electronic compositions. These combined elements illuminate an interwoven collection of concepts, associations and stories that mirror Darwin’s complex exploration of evolution and universal connectedness. In the spirit of natural selection, audience members choose the sequence of onstage events during the performance.

CHANGING SKINS: Compiled and performed by Milbre Burch and directed by Emily Rollie, featuring photographs from “Meta-Genesis,” (above) an exhibit of portraits of transgender folk by Columbia, MO-based photographer, Jane Lavender.Changing Skins interweaves gender-bending folktales from cultures spanning the globe with musings on the construction of gender and identity. Compelling storytelling for grownups!

A smoking monkey dressed as a Marquis, a Wild West scalping scene created in beeswax, a cemetery scene made from the deceased’s hair, and stuffed pug dog puppies, all under glass domes!!!!!

The bell jar, or glass parlor dome, is synonymous with our memory of the Victorian Age (1837 – 1901). During the 19th century, these blown glass forms were referred to not as domes but as shades, and graced nearly every parlor, protecting a broad variety of treasures–including miniature tableaux, waxworks, natural history specimens, taxidermy of exotic birds and pets, automatons, and delicate arrangements of hairwork, featherwork, and shellwork–from dust and curious fingers. (READ MORE.)

WORK Gallery is pleased to present Museum of (Un) Natural History featuring new sculptures and a street installation by artist Kim Holleman. The Museum is a collection of environments that have all been drastically physically and/or psychologically changed by human intervention. Using mostly synthetic materials, noxious chemicals, and items culled from the trash or found on the street, Holleman creates models of parks, empty lots, nostalgic structures and architectural futures. Each miniaturized landscape represents and critiques our consumptive habits and land use, the visual results of which are both fantastical and grim. Hazardous threats to the environment’s natural balance overwhelm the landscapes, leaving an eerie beauty in the wake of irreversible destruction.

In a truck lot adjacent to the Museum is Trailer Park: A Mobile Public Park, a “portable, natural, public park” inside an RV trailer. The interior is an actual park, where visitors go inside to go outside. Masonry paths, a waterfall, and the splendor of living shrubs, trees are ready for dispatch to wherever a green refuge is needed.

“I create fictional spaces that explore the intersection of memory, history and myth through the landscape-as-image. My method is to photograph, collect, deconstruct, and reassemble photographic material — collapsing multiple points in time and space into a single scene. This mirrors the fragmentation and flattening of experience as it occurs in the creation of memory while reflecting a sense of dislocation from place. As an atavistic response to the landscape, my images engage ‘land’ as a site of indifferent natural forces. Seen through a texture of skin, ash and the blackened fuzz of a violent guitar, each work is subsequently a nostalgic articulation of our histories, new histories made impossible by memory and mythology”. Jeremy Dyer lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.

NoMAA is pleased to announce the arrival of the Uptown Arts Stroll 2011, the most anticipated annual community arts festival in Washington Heights and Inwood. The Stroll will showcase the outstanding painters, photographers, writers, musicians, actors, dancers, and other creative people and arts groups that are contributing to the cultural life of Northern Manhattan. These artists will exhibit and perform in local businesses and institutions, open spaces, parks and other local venues throughout the month of June.

This year, NoMAA is delighted to partner with the 12th Annual Carnaval del Boulevard, a celebration of Dominican & Latino culture produced by the Juan Pablo Duarte Foundation, The Malcolm X & Dr. Betty Shabazz Memorial and Educational Center, and the Washington Heights Business Improvement District, to kick-off the Stroll with a community celebration on Thursday, June 2nd, 6–8:30 p.m. at The Shabazz Center. On Saturday, June 4th, NoMAA and the Stroll will join El Carnaval del Boulevard and the Washington Heights BID from 11 a.m. – 5 p.m. on St. Nicholas Avenue from 181st to 188th Sts., presenting art and performances from our local artists. read more »

Join us for a surprise work-in-progress presentation of WaxFactory’s 416 MINUTES, featuring an extraordinary collaboration with artists from Japan and Eastern Europe, and inspired by the imagination of Haruki Murakami. In the company’s signature multidisciplinary style, this unsettling new work shadows an actress whose escape from a film studio sets her on a trail of chance encounters during the hours of the night when things take on a particularly eerie glow. Conceived and directed by Ivan Talijancic. Free Admission. Reception to follow.

Over the past 15 years, David Sandlin has produced eight major volumes (and several side works) of narratively connected artist’s books, collectively called A Sinner’s Progress. The books have ranged in format from hand-silkscreened limited editions to tabloid-style newspapers and pulp comics, each in service to its narrative function. Thanks to a fellowship from the NYPL’s Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers in 2010, Sandlin has begun work on a graphic novel, which he intends to be the culmination of the series. Belfaust, a love-triangle mystery loosely based on the Faust legend, will depict the backstory of the three main characters in A Sinner’s Progress and bring the narrative to closure. Sandlin’s presentation will discuss his influences and process in regard to the series.

Stemming from old world styles and techniques, Cirque des Batardes is an avant-garde approach to classical forms such as vaudeville, commedia dell’arte, buffon, ventriloquism and, of course, cirque. Essentially taking on the form of a comic variety show, Cirque features a dozen acts including dancers, actors, and musicians to create a hilarious evening of spectacle and oddity. Led by their questionable emcee, the entire company seems to come from a different time. The entire production, in fact, appears in sepia tone like an old film dusted off and rediscovered. The company of misfits and performers must learn deal with their old school ways in the modern context in order to survive.

With his vintage Leica and accompanied by a young translator named Lolly Pop, American photographer Danny Lyon traveled across Shanxi Province in North West China six times between 2005 and 2009. The result of Lyon’s unfailing enthusiasm for immersing himself in local banter and customs is an extraordinary portrait of China and the Chinese, one seldom seen by foreigners. Lyon’s unparalleled photographic findings and discoveries are presented in this limited edition photobook alongside his handwritten annotations and commentary, as well as his ever-inquisitive and non-judgmental prose.

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In the middle of the Pacific Ocean, thousands of miles away from land, and humans, there is enormous floating reminder of the indelible mark we leave from afar. Called the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, the Plastic Vortex and the world’s largest landfill, the North Pacific Gyre is a combination of currents and carelessness that makes up what some suggest is a wasteland filled with plastic. Rife with fantastic sounding aquatic traps such as “ghost nets,” it is suggested that its collection is of such a scale that, as of yet, no one has been able to calculate its true size.

In a song by local Park Slope musicians Whale Belly, there is an interesting lyric “I know what I hate, I just don’t know why.”

The upcoming show Whale Belly is slated to perform in, Post Plastic Project at Littlefield in Brooklyn, plans to remedy just such ignorance through a feast of artists, musicians and comedians curated to raise money, and awareness for the environmental organization, Project Kaisei.

Discovered by chance in 1997 by oceanographer Charles Moore, the North Pacific Gyre is Project Kaisei’s main focus. Kaisei itself began in late 2008 when co-founders, Doug Woodring, George Orbelian, and Mary T. Crowley, found a need to bring attention and research to the growing problem of plastic pollution. In 2009 Kaisei launched its brigantine vessel (the namesake of Kaisei, meaning “Ocean Planet”) and an oceanography vessel called “New Horizon,” donated from partnering organization Scripps Institute of Oceanography. The mission was to collect and calculate data on the amount, type, and breakdown rates of plastic litter that is trapped in the middle of the ocean.

Some findings maintain that certain types of plastic are breaking down at rates much faster than imagined. Most recently the rate was a year or less for some materials to completely disintegrate and penetrate waters and wildlife, raising concerns about toxin levels in fish and other saltwater animals. Utilizing a variety of technological outlets to get their message across, Team Kaisei reports directly from the boat with updates on their findings, and even has a voyage tracker via Google Earth that allows you pinpoint the location, and view interactive message from crew members.

When I asked Lindsay Bourget, one of the curators of the Post Plastic Project, “Why Kaisei?” she answered directly, “I started this project because I wanted to find someone to donate to that made the most sense and they [Project Kaisei] made the most sense to me, because their number one goal is to capture the plastic vortex and that’s exactly what I was most concerned about, so it seemed like a natural fit.” Some debate remains about the severity and size of the litter in the North Pacific Gyre, along with concerns about disturbing wildlife in the effort to collect, as well as the idea that full collection of all the plastic is a Sisyphean task. Nevertheless when I asked Lindsay about her concern for the validity of such projects in the face these doubts as well as major global disasters (particularly oil spills) she acknowledged “it can be really discouraging, but then you think there’s only one way to really start making a change.”

Co-curator Laina Karavani adds, “Sometimes artists and musicians are the only one’s that people really listen to and can help illicit change, and that’s what this is all about, moving towards that change.”

Post Plastic Project will demonstrate by example, using soy ink, and semi-recycled paper in their printing materials through Long Island City based, ColorCoded, and party materials (cups, plates, etc) provided by SustyParty, a New York based company that provides a line of eco-friendly, biodegradable party products made from corn oil, tapioca starch and other recycled materials, along with a bin to collect and ensure compost.

The artists and musicians are pooled from both Lindsay and Laina’s art and design background. Lindsay currently works in packing and architectural design, and went to Colorado Institute of Art, while Laina is photographer originally from New Jersey. Laina moved to San Francisco to attend the Art Academy of San Francisco, and found herself in an environment of high sustainability expectations. Drawing from this experience and from a childhood where recycling was the norm, Laina and Lindsay were eventually introduced by a professor who thought they might be a good match (their birthdays are only two days apart.) As the project grew larger both realized that this kind of grassroots organization for a less dire cause might be exactly what people were looking for.

The show is a powerhouse in itself with fifteen artists, four bands, and two MC’s. Mostly local fare, the artists were friends of or approached directly by Lindsay and Laina, and much to their surprise, nearly all said yes. With the increase of sustainable forms of living becoming the norm in Brooklyn it was easy to see that Lindsay and Laina’s project provided the perfect outlet for supporters looking for a more manageable idea of altruism.

The line up for music is strong and ranges from the pipes of a classically trained opera singer (singing in a rock band of course) Little Grey Girlfriend, the upbeat and introspective words and sound of Whale Belly (Park Slope), The Robin Electric with nostalgic twinges of their Cleveland roots, and string band turned electric from Chicago, Panoramic and True.